Abstract

The Cantus database is a well-established project devoted to the creation and
distribution of electronic indices of manuscript and early printed sources of Latin
chant for the liturgical Office. As of January 2011, there were over 379,000 records
in the database, each of which is an individual chant in one of the 134 manuscripts
which have been indexed to date. For over a decade, this research tool has been
growing and adapting to the needs of chant scholars, musicologists, hagiographers,
art historians and researchers in other fields. In addition to the basic search
functions and downloading options, there are now several analytical tools available
on the website, including a textual concordance and an interactive
dendrogram-creation tool. The latter, an example of data-mining, allows the user to
select a series of chants which will form the basis of a comparison among the
numerous manuscripts whose contents are recorded in Cantus. Similarities in chant
series can be interpreted as affinities among manuscripts, and so, the dendrograms
which are created (through the calculations of similarity matrices) can assist
researchers in identifying related chant repertories, in studying the origins and
dissemination of saints' feasts, in providing evidence for the provenance of
manuscript sources and, undoubtedly, for numerous other research applications.

§ 1Cantus: A database for Latin ecclesiastical
chant (<http://cantusdatabase.org/>; also available from
<http://margot.uwaterloo.ca/cantus/index.html>) is a
well-established online project devoted to the creation and distribution of digital
indices of medieval chant manuscripts and early printed books for the liturgical
Office. For almost two decades, this freely-accessible research tool has been growing
and adapting to the needs of scholars in a variety of fields, such as musicology
(ecclesiastical chant and the sacred polyphony of the Middle Ages and Renaissance),
liturgical drama, hagiography, palaeography, philology, art history, ecclesiastical
history and monasticism. By providing a searchable database of detailed information
for the over 379,000 chants entered to date,[1] Cantus is also a
useful digital archive for librarians, archivists, amateur chant enthusiasts, auction
houses (where medieval manuscripts and individual folia are sometimes sold), as well
as performers of this early music, including church musicians, directors of liturgy
and members of monastic communities.

§ 2The most popular features on the website continue to be the
search and download functions, and it is mainly for these aspects of Cantus that the
website has received an average of approximately 15,000 visits per month over the
last few years from users all around the world. In addition to these basic functions,
Cantus has begun to offer several online, interactive analytical tools which utilize
the data in a variety of ways. The current offerings include a textual concordance,
programmes which compare series of chants in order to identify regional or widespread
traditions, and a dendrogram-creation programme which provides a visual display of
the degree of similarity or difference among medieval sources of chant. More analysis
programmes are being proposed. These applications of the data housed in Cantus
demonstrate the research potential of this relatively large mass of information and
illustrate the flexibility and usefulness of indices of chant manuscripts in a
digital medium.

A brief history of Cantus

§ 3Cantus was developed in the late 1980s by Ruth Steiner at the
Catholic University of America. The first files were created on a mainframe computer
and distributed in the post on floppy diskettes. By the mid-1990s, the database had
been posted to the Internet first with a Gopher protocol and then, eventually, to the
World Wide Web where it has remained with open access for all interested users. From
1997 until 2010, the base of operations was at the University of Western Ontario
(UWO) under the leadership of Terence Bailey; during these years, there was
tremendous growth in the database and it became firmly established as an effective
and reliable research tool. On 1 December 2010, following the retirement of Bailey,
Debra Lacoste entered into a collaboration with MARGOT at the University of Waterloo,
Ontario and Cantus became one of the partners in their cluster of medieval, online,
digital humanities projects. [2]

The database

§ 4In the Cantus database, each record is an individual chant in
a manuscript. Each record contains such information as the folio number on which the
chant is found, the liturgical occasion or feast day (that is,
the day of the liturgical year, such as Christmas, St. Benedict’s Day, or the
Wednesday following the eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost), the first few words of
the chant in the incipit field, the melodic mode to which the
chant belongs (that is, one of the eight medieval church modes), the liturgical
Office for which the chant was intended to be sung (such as Matins, Lauds, Vespers,
and so on), the genre of the chant (for example, hymn, responsory, antiphon, etc.),
as well as supplementary fields which contain additional information.

§ 5The database was created to assist scholars who work with
medieval chant manuscripts. A formidable challenge in the study of the medieval
Office is the very large number of surviving sources and the variability in
arrangement of their contents. Each hand-copied manuscript, which regularly may
contain thousands of chants, is unique and testifies to the tradition of a specific
time and place. Although the liturgy in the various antiphoners and breviaries is
often similar from one book to another, the ordering, selection and placement of
specific chants can differ substantially. Scholars regularly use the data provided
free-of-charge in Cantus to locate particular chants on which they are working and to
navigate through microfilms or digital image libraries.

§ 6Although the original purpose of the database was the creation
of tables of contents for medieval Office books, many
researchers have begun to employ the data in Cantus in creative ways. What follows is
a description of the known ways that Cantus data has been manipulated, augmented, and
programmed into applications in order to further research into the long tradition of
medieval ecclesiastical chant. Chant-researching pioneers in the field of digital
humanities will no doubt expand on this listing of methodologies in the coming
years.

The creation of tonaries

§ 7One of the first applications of Cantus data beyond its
usefulness in locating individual chants on particular folios was the creation of
tonaries. A tonary is a listing by mode of the antiphons which were sung in medieval
worship. A tonary was often copied as part of a medieval service book, and the church
cantors could refer to these lists when preparing their psalm tone recitations.
However, not all medieval service books were copied with a tonary, and some tonaries
have been separated from their service books. Furthermore, we do not know if existing
tonaries are complete or 100% accurate without first comparing their lists of chants
with the actual contents of related manuscripts. For purposes of comparison and
study, a tonary can easily be created from the Cantus index of a manuscript with a
simple database query: this involves merely sorting the antiphons by their modes and
differentiae.[3]

Figure 1: Tonary query

Modal and melodic analyses

§ 8Many chant scholars have an interest the relationships between
chants in different melodic modes.[4] Some chant texts exist with multiple melodies
and some chant melodies can be interpreted and reinterpreted in different modes based
on various characteristics, such as their opening melodic gestures and their final
cadences. The numerical assignment of mode numbers 1 to 8 in Cantus indices is a
great benefit in this type of research; searching and sorting of many thousands of
records can be accomplished in mere minutes.

Melodic incipits in Volpiano font

§ 9Also aiding the study of chant melodies is one of the more
recent developments in Cantus: the inclusion in some indices of the melodic incipits
or the complete melodies of the chants in a form of letter notation which presents as
a series of Arabic letters and dashes in a data-string, and as round note-heads on a
five-line musical staff when the font Volpiano is applied.
Volpiano font is named for the early-eleventh-century
theorist William of Volpiano (Guillaume de Dijon, cf. Bent et al. 2009), who is credited with the letter notation used in the
manuscript Montpellier H. 159.[5] Each letter in the font corresponds to a pitch in
William's a-p series of alphabetic notation. For example, the application of Volpiano
font to the data-string 1---c--d--e--f---4 results in the
presentation of corresponding pitches on a modern staff with a treble clef (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Volpiano font applied to a data-string.

§ 10Chant melodies encoded in Volpiano font are searchable and
sortable data-strings in Cantus records, as shown in Figure 3.

§ 11The data-strings in a Cantus record display on the Details page of the UWO website as melodies in modern notation
if the host computer has Volpiano font installed (see Figure 4).[6]

Figure 4: Website "Details" page showing all the recorded
data for one chant, including the melodic incipit displayed in Volpiano
font.

Textual concordance

§ 12Another use of Cantus data is in the textual
concordance.[7] The user can enter into the search box one or more words,
such as Ecce nomen or Ave Maria and see a listing of occurrences
within the database. The user can then view the context of the search words within
any of the manuscripts in which those words occur, that is, the placement of those
words among neighbouring chants on the folio side or page. More advanced searches are
also available, as detailed in the HELP tab.

Responsory series comparative tool

§ 13Previous studies have successfully shown that a similarity in
the usage and ordering of particular items of the liturgy can be interpreted as an
indication of affinity among sources (Hesbert
1963-79); the more the manuscripts resemble one another with respect to the
chants they contain and the order in which those chants occur, the more likely there
is to be a common tradition linking them together. One could presume that the data
housed in Cantus is an ideal resource for such comparisons. A featured programme on
the UWO Cantus website is the interactive database Responsory
Series: Advent and Lent, an application that can assist researchers in
identifying the degrees of similarity between over 900 sources of medieval western
chant through comparison of the usage and ordering of responsory
chants.[8] The user can select any
one of the entered series of responsoria prolixa
(the Great Responsories)[9] for the four Sundays of Advent or the six Sundays of
Lent and use that series of chants as the basis for a comparison with the other
records entered for that particular Sunday. There are three methods of comparison
available, that is, three methods of mathematical calculation,[10] and the results are listed with the closest
affiliations at the top (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Responsory series sample results for a comparison involving series for
the first Sunday in Lent (L1), with "Klo3" (i.e., Klosterneuburg,
Augustiner-Chorherrenstift - Bibliothek, 1017) as the head of the
series, the one against which all others are compared.

§ 14One can see with only a few clicks of the mouse which chant
traditions are similar to the source that is the head of the
comparison; with a few more clicks, the user can change the
head-series to either another Sunday for the same manuscript
or to a different source altogether, or select a different method of comparison, and
a new set of results will appear.

Cantus series comparative tool

§ 15Establishing relationships between manuscript sources can lead
to new hypotheses regarding the transmission of chant, the development or retention
of local customs and numerous other topics. Expanding on the Responsory
Series tool, the Cantus Series programme extracts
and compares chant series of all types from the Cantus database. The data can be
manipulated according to the user's preferences; researchers can select for
comparison any series of chants for any liturgical
occasion. Results are displayed in long lists, similar to the format for the series
comparisons of responsory chants.

Dendrograms

§ 16Since it is difficult to know how to interpret and utilize
lengthy lists of numbers, the comparative calculations from both the Responsory
Series and Cantus Series programmes can be represented in the visual format of the
dendrogram, a model adopted from cluster analysis techniques
used in the biological sciences.[11] The
dendrogram website tool[12] is an interactive online programme that allows the user to
demonstrate the relationships between manuscripts in a branching diagram. These
dendrograms, which are created through the calculations of similarity matrices, can
assist researchers in identifying related chant repertories, in studying the origins
and dissemination of saints' feasts, in providing evidence for the provenance of
manuscript sources and, undoubtedly, for numerous other research applications. For
example, the relationship of the five series of responsories for the fourth Sunday of
Advent shown in Figure 6 can be represented in a
similarity matrix as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 6: Five different series of responsory chants for the fourth Sunday of
Advent (A4).

Figure 7: The matrix representing the calculations of similarity and difference
among the five series of responsory chants in Figure 6.

§ 17Notice the diagonal of zeroes showing self-similarity in the
matrix, much as a distance table on a road map shows the number of kilometres or
miles between cities. The calculations for the similarity matrix can be transferred
into a clearer visual representation through the use of the dendrogram shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Dendrogram showing the degrees of similarity between the five responsory
series in Figures 6 and 7.

§ 18The liturgical occasion (that is, the Sunday) is listed in the
first of the columns on the right-hand side; for this example, the chant series
involved in this comparison are taken from the fourth Sunday of Advent (A4). The
manuscript sigla are after the cursus (monastic or secular[13]), followed by an indication of the dates of the sources and a
brief word concerning their provenance, the latter being abbreviated to twelve
characters owing to space restrictions. Interpreting the dendrogram involves
observing the distances of the vertical lines; the closer the vertical connecting
lines are to the manuscript sigla (i.e., further to the right side of the page or
screen), the more similar the series are. This dendrogram shows that, for this group
of five responsory series, there is a fairly close-knit association in the sources
from Boulogne, Fritzlar and Paris.[14] The manuscript from Padua is the outsider in this group, while the one from
Bohemia takes an intermediary position.[15]

§ 19Series of chants within a cluster are more similar to each
other than they are to series outside the cluster. Therefore, the series from
Boulogne and Fritzlar are more similar to each other than either is to the series
from Paris, Padua or Bohemia. It is important to note that from the dendrogram we
cannot determine exactly how close the series from Paris is to either Boulogne or
Fritzlar; we can only see how close the Paris series is to the cluster formed by the
other two. These conclusions are, obviously, only valid within the group of these
five series. What are interesting and often enlightening are the dendrograms
involving hundreds of sources from various regions and liturgical traditions of
medieval Europe. The Cantus data awaits the eager users of this online comparative
tool.

§ 20Through its previous two decades, as Cantus has both grown and
transformed to serve an increasing base of users, the integrity of and respect for
the project have remained strong owing to collaboration within the academic
community. A few of the manuscript indices in the Cantus database have been produced
by junior research assistants on the Cantus staff but many others have been
contributed by scholars worldwide;[16] the high
number of donated indices to this database demonstrates the frequent collaborative
efforts that we have been witnessing in this burgeoning new era of humanities
computing.

§ 21The usefulness of Cantus as a chant research tool is proven
both by the number of visits to the website and by the praiseworthy testimonials of
chant scholars from around the world. Amid such affirmations of importance, the
database continues to expand and seek new directions in an effort to serve scholars,
assist in the development of new research and establish the study of chant firmly
within the scope of the digital humanities.

Notes:

[1]. As of January 2011, the Cantus
database contained complete indices of 134 manuscript and early printed
sources, a total of 379,206 individual chants.

[2]. After years of support from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada and The University of Western
Ontario, the Cantus database (<http://publish.uwo.ca/~cantus>)
was fortunate to receive funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the
period from March 2011 to February 2012 to redesign the website and database
using MySQL in a Drupal framework. This has been carried out in collaboration
with the MARGOT project at the University of Waterloo. Cantus can now be
accessed at: <http://margot.uwaterloo.ca/cantus/index.html> with
a direct link to the data at: <http://cantusdatabase.org/>. The
analytical tools available on the UWO website will remain online indefinitely;
the first priority in the 2011 year of transition has been the transference of
the browsing, searching and downloading functions.

[3]. The eight medieval church modes to which the
freely-melodic antiphons were assigned are entered into the database as the
numbers 1 to 8. Differentiae are the sometimes numerous cadences for the eight
formulaic psalm tones that correspond to each mode. The grouping of antiphons
whose accompanying psalm recitations employ the same differentia often
demonstrates familial melodic relationships among those antiphons; this
organization of melodies by mode and differentia simulates the listings in
existing medieval tonaries.

[4]. For example, Ike de Loos was interested in
chants with multiple melodies or melodies which could be interpreted and
reinterpreted in different modes. She engaged in a comparison of modal (i.e.,
numerical) assignments in de Loos
unpublished.

[7]. The textual concordance is available from the UWO Cantus
website.

[8]. Although the information contained in the Responsory Series
database shares a similar format with Cantus data with respect to chant ID
numbers, normalization of spelling, genre identification codes, etc., the
Responsory Series website tool accesses a separate set of database tables.
These tables contain only the series of responsory chants for specified Sundays
for over 900 sources, whereas the Cantus tables contain full indices of all the
chants in, as of January 2011, 134 sources.

[9]. The Great
Responsories are lengthy, elaborate chants which were sung
primarily during the Office of Matins in series of either nine or twelve,
depending on the cursus (monastic or secular). The selection of particular
chants and the order in which they were sung varied from place to place across
medieval Europe; it is the uniformity or lack thereof within these chant series
that provides a useful starting point for research into local or regional chant
traditions.

[10]. These are: 1.
Matches/Pairs, 2. Edit Distance, and 3. Longest Common Sequence. For an
explanation of these methods, see Lacoste and
Stafleu 2009.

[13]. Each manuscript
record contains a cursus field that includes
M for monastic or
S for secular (i.e. cathedral or
non-monastic) sources. This information is vital for the calculations of
similarity since monastic manuscripts usually provide twelve (or more)
responsories for each liturgical day and cathedral sources provide only
nine.

[16]. Contributed files as well as those
produced by Cantus staff are thoroughly proofread before being uploaded into
the web-database. The proofreading process involves a complete manual pass by
an experienced indexer followed by electronic proofreading which employs
forty-nine customized queries within Microsoft’s Access.

Beyssac, Gabriel M. 1993. Unpublished work on chant series
in the Pro Defunctis Office, as referenced in
Ottosen, Knud. The Responsories and versicles of the Latin office
of the dead. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, p. v.↵

de Loos, Ike. Unpublished. Modes
and melodies: An investigation into the great responsories of the Gregorian and
Old Roman chant repertoires. Presented at the 18th
Congress of the International Musicological Society, Zurich,
2007.↵

Helsen, Kate and Lacoste, Debra. 2011. Report on the encoding of melodic incipits in the Cantus database
with the music font 'Volpiano'. Plainsong &
Medieval Music 20/1: pp. 51-65.↵